Israel has declared Nobel-winning author Günter Grass persona non grata, deepening a spat with the writer over a poem that deeply criticised the Jewish state and suggested it was as much a danger as Iran.
If Günter wants to spread his twisted and lying works, I suggest he does this from Iran, where he can find a supportive audience- Israeli Interior Minister
The dispute with Mr Grass, who only late in life admitted to a Nazi past, has drawn new attention to strains in Germany’s complicated relationship with the Jewish state − and also focused unwelcome light on Israel’s own secretive nuclear programme.
In his poem called What Must Be Said published last Wednesday, Mr Grass, 84, criticised what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel’s nuclear programme and labelled the country a threat to “an already fragile world peace” over its belligerent stance on Iran.
The poem has touched a raw nerve in Israel, where officials have rejected any moral equivalence with Iran and were quick to note that Mr Grass admitted in a 2006 autobiography that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS Nazi paramilitary organisation at the age of 17 in the final months of World War II.
Mr Grass’s subsequent clarification that his criticism was directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not the country as a whole, did little to calm the outcry.
Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced that Mr Grass would be barred from Israel, citing an Israeli law that allows him to prevent entry to ex-Nazis.
But Mr Yishai made clear the decision was related more to the recent poem than Mr Grass’s actions nearly 70 years ago.
“If Günter wants to spread his twisted and lying works, I suggest he does this from Iran, where he can find a supportive audience,” Mr Yishai said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused Mr Grass of anti-Semitism.
The uproar has touched upon some of the most sensitive issues in modern-day Israel − the Holocaust, Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons and Israel’s own illicit nuclear programme that is widely believed to have produced an arsenal of bombs.
It also has unleashed a debate in Germany, where criticism of Israel is largely muffled because of the country’s Nazi past. Mr Grass’s most famous book, The Tin Drum, is about the rise of the Nazis and World War II as told through the lives of ordinary people.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.
According to a biography from his museum in Germany, Mr Grass has been in Israel at least once − notably accompanying Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1973 on the first official state visit of a German Chancellor to Israel.
Israel gained independence in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust and became a refuge for hundreds of thousands of survivors of World War II Nazi genocide of six million Jews.
An unofficial translation of part of Mr Grass’s poem, What Must Be Said, by Associated Press
Why do I stay silent, conceal for too long
What is obvious and has been
Practised in war games, at the end of which we as survivors
Are at best footnotes.
It is the alleged right to the first strike
That could annihilate the Iranian people − Subjugated by a loudmouth
And guided to organised jubilation −
Because in their sphere of power,
It is suspected, a nuclear bomb is being built.